Mariano Luis de Urquijo (1769-1817) was Prime Minister of Spain from 12 February 1799 to 13 December 1800, succeeding Francesco Saavedra de Sangronis and preceding Pedro Cevallos Guerra, and again from 7 July 1808 to 27 June 1813, succeeding Cevallos and preceding Juan O'Donoju.
Biography[]
Mariano Luis de Urquijo was born in Bilbao, Spain in 1769 to a notable Basque family, and he entered the foreign service after living in Ireland for a few years. Urquijo was a Francophile an enemy of the Catholic church, as he translated some of Voltaire's works, but he became Prime Minister in 1799 under King Carlos IV of Spain. Urquijo negotiated the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso with the French Consulate, retroceding French Louisiana to France in exchange for the Spanish acquisition of Tuscany, but the Queen's favorite Manuel de Godoy engineered Urquijo's downfall in 1800 due to his popularity eclipsing his own. From 1808 to 1813, he served as Prime Minister under Joseph Bonaparte, as he opposed the ultra-conservative policies of Carlos IV, and he fled to France after the end of the Peninsular War. He died in Paris in 1817.